درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The current study investigates the feasibility of implementing EFL teachers' Individual Development Planning at Iranian public schools. It further explores the underlying reasons for the (imp) possibility of practicing this program and seeks the teachers' suggestions to improve the schools' condition. To this end, data were collected from 180 EFL teachers using a researcher-made questionnaire and a follow-up semi-structured interview. The results of one-sample t-tests revealed a slight possibility following the interviews which indicated 14 underlying reasons for the insufficient grounds at public schools. Participating teachers also argued that equipping a room with necessary technological tools, allocating monetary resources, assigning specific teachers time to practice IDP, taking advantage of head teachers, changing the school administration delegation, and performing advocating cultural acts can provide a ground for IDP implementation. The findings demonstrate the necessity of creating changes by policymakers, school principals, and EFL teachers so that they can all benefit from this program.

The ICTs have invaded not only the fields of business, economics, and different sciences, but also the field of education and particularly language teaching and learning. This article addresses a crucial issue related to the use of ICTs at the university in Morocco and its impact on the academic performance of students. Many studies in the review of literature are presented and they mainly revolve around similar issues related to advantages and disadvantages of ICTs in general, however little attention has been devoted to the relationship between ICTs and academic performance. Thus, this article seeks to answer a set of research questions along with hypotheses which are tested and discussed following some statistical procedures. The researcher looks at the correlation between the use of ICTs in higher education and students’ academic performance. A questionnaire was designed and submitted to a sample of students composed of 108 students from four major universities in Morocco. Cronbach’s alpha was obtained to test the reliability of the instrument. The findings indicate that the implementation of ICTs in higher education is positively correlated with the academic performance of students. The implications of this study suggest that integrating ICTs into higher education can lead to improved academic performance of students. This has significant implications for educators and policymakers who can use this information to design and implement effective ICT-based teaching and learning strategies to enhance student learning outcomes. The study also highlights the importance of considering the relationship between ICT use and academic performance in educational research and policy-making. The results provide a foundation for further research on the use of ICTs in higher education and their impact on student success.

In recent years, some language teachers have made investments in approaches and models such as mobile assisted flipped language learning. Some studies in Iran have examined flipped learning impact on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ language skills as well as language systems. However, no researches have been conducted on the impact mobile assisted flipped learning might have on improvement of intermediate EFL learners’ cohesive devices and their motivation to learn cohesion which is the focus of the current study. To this end, 40 female intermediate EFL learners in an English language institute in Kerman, Iran were recruited. Employing a quasi-experimental design, subjects were assigned to two classes of experimental (EG- N = 20) and control (CG-N = 20). Oxford Placement Test, researcher-made writing achievement tests, and Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) were utilized to collect the required data. The findings indicate that participants in mobile assisted flipped language learning group outperformed those in the control group. Moreover, the results of a chi-square test showed a significant relationship between mobile assisted flipped language learning and intermediate EFL learners’ motivation to learn cohesive devices. The findings might help stakeholders design, introduce, and address mobile assisted flipped language learning to their context-specific needs, thereby facilitating the language learning process.

Synesthesia, among other rhetorical devices, has played a prominent role in conveying the intended messages in the realm of poetry. Nonetheless, it has not grabbed adequate attention to its nature and function. Belonging to the domain of comparative literature, this essay has benefitted from analogy studies as its methodology to render novel perspectives in the meaning and reading of the poetry of Sitwell and Ebtehaj. Here, we have attempted, firstly, to foreground the function of synesthesia and, secondly, to enrich the understanding of the mentioned poets. This paper concludes that the realization of synesthesia heavily and helpfully affects the perception of literary poems. In addition, to showcase such influence, a reasonable number of poems by Sitwell and Ebtehaj were subjected to scrutiny, indicating that a great deal of their poetry is best understood only after investigating synesthesia. This essay is merely concentrated on two poets, yet its findings can be helpful for the whole field of poetry.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of task type (i.e., sentence fill-in/sentence writing) and word type (i.e., real/ pseudo) on initial learning and retention of 10 word meanings, taking the predictions of Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) and Technique Feature Analysis (TFA) into account. Participants were 59 intermediate-level EFL learners from eight intact classes. Each intact class was randomly assigned to one of the four learning conditions: 1) sentence fill-in with real words, 2) sentence writing with real words, 3) sentence fill-in with pseudowords, and 4) sentence writing with pseudowords. Initial learning was measured by administering a meaning recall test immediately after the tasks and medium-term retention was measured by administering the same test with rearranged items one week after the tasks phase. The results of a mixed between-within subjects ANOVA did not show any significant interaction effect between test time and learning condition. Furthermore, the main effect for learning condition was not statistically significant but there was a significant main effect for test time, suggesting that participants’ scores dropped significantly from the immediate posttest to the delayed posttest. The findings of two independent-samples t-tests failed to show any significant difference between the immediate and delayed posttest scores of the participants who received either sentence fill-in or sentence writing tasks. However, some tentative findings demonstrated that those participants who were assigned to the sentence writing task achieved higher scores on the posttests. This finding indicates that TFA has probably more predictive power than ILH and it also provides some evidence in favor of the heavier weight of the evaluation component of the ILH when compared to its search component.

Iranian high school students confront various challenges in understanding reading passages and learning vocabulary since appropriate process-oriented assessment techniques with constructive and communicative feedback are not practiced to consolidate instruction and learning. The effect of formative assessment (FA) retelling strategy on vocabulary knowledge and understanding passages was investigated and scrutinized in this quasi-experimental study in the EFL context. Thus, a sample of 48 intermediate EFL students was selected and assigned to two intact groups. The retelling assessment was implemented for the experimental group (EG), while the product-oriented summative assessment was applied to the control group (CG). The pre-test scores were taken at the first phase of the study followed by the eight-week assessment process. Finally, the post-test scores were taken. For the purpose of the analysis, the Independent Samples T-test and the one-way  ANCOVA were utilized to compare and contrast the mean scores. The findings were in favor of the retelling technique which developed the vocabulary command and text comprehension in the EG. Moreover, little or no significant impact was revealed for the product-oriented assessment in the CG. The findings can be pedagogically rewarding for learners, teachers and theoreticians and may cast light on SLA research in applying FA techniques.

Pragmatic failure is an issue usually occurring in cross-cultural communication when L2 learners cannot express themselves appropriately. This study aimed to discern the factors leading to cross-cultural pragmatic failure (CCPF) and the challenges EFL learners face in trying to overcome miscommunication problems. Following a qualitative research design, in the first study phase, one of the researchers observed 10 EFL teachers’ classes for 90 minutes each, twice a week during the term to take the required field notes for further analysis. To obtain more in-depth information, in the second phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 EFL teachers and learners, and the data were collected. The EFL teachers were from private English language institutes, and the student participants were EFL learners studying either in state-run universities or private language centers. The results of the thematic analysis revealed that EFL classroom context, time and budget, assessing pragmatic knowledge, ELT textbook, and teacher education were perceived as the causes of CCPF by the interviewees. Moreover, the extracted themes associated with learners’ challenges included linguistic incompetency, investing insufficient time and effort, psychological factors, cultural and sociocultural differences, inappropriate teaching methodology, and teachers’ pragmatic competence.

Task complexity has recently attracted great attention in second language (L2) studies. However, its potential impacts on learning transitional devices have not been considered. The current study was an attempt to analyze the impacts of manipulating task complexity conditions on EFL learners’ grammatical enhancement in terms of learning transitional devices through doing writing tasks. For this purpose, 75 intermediate EFL learners learning English in three English language institutes in Iran were randomly selected. They were assigned to four experimental groups and one control group (each with 15 participants). Each of the experimental groups was presented with a pretest, writing tasks, an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest. The participants took part in 9 sessions and in each session some transitional devices were introduced to the experimental groups with which they were supposed to write a paragraph based on a special topic using all those transitional devices. The different experimental groups received writing tasks with different complexity levels which were determined through the manipulation of factors including ± few elements and ± planning time. The participants in the control group just participated in a regular English class for 9 sessions without doing such tasks. The performances of all groups were analyzed, and the findings revealed statistically significant differences among the five groups in both the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest, after controlling for the effect of the pretest. The findings of the current study have practical implications for curriculum development and EFL writing instruction.

Discrepant cultural systems of languages are more likely to reflect challenges for translators maintaining the cultural dynamics of translation. Such perspective is mostly highlighted in the translation of literary texts where the main parts of the equation are language and culture. The present study aims to investigate cultural, historical and religious loss or gain in the translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) along with the rendering procedures used by the translators. To this end, through a comparative analytical and descriptive method based on (Vinay & Darbelent Model, 1995), culture-specific items of three Persian translations of the Huckleberry Finn story were extracted and divided into three subcategories of cultural, historical, and religious; consequently, the procedures applied by the translators which led to the cultural loss or gain were analyzed. The findings demonstrated that the first translation by Mohebbi had the highest degree of loss (17.16%), and the third translation by Daryabandari had the highest degree of gain (41.58%). Also, the highest frequency of lost items belonged to the cultural type with %6/31 in the first translation by Mohebbi and %2/52 in the second translation by Pirnazar. The findings indicated that the policies and normative differences of societies in different periods had an undeniable impact on the transmission of concepts which reflects the degree of loss and gain in translation. The result of the present study could be thought-provoking for psychoanalytical studies on the translator’s decision-making.